Visual Culture and the Word in Edgar Allan Poe's "The Man of the Crowd"Author(s): Kevin J. HayesSource: Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 56, No. 4 (Mar., 2002), pp. 445-465Published by: University of California PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3176877Accessed: 11/11/2010 06:32

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Visual Culture and the Word in Edgar Allan Poe's "The Man of the Crowd" KEVIN J. HAYES

i DGAR Allan Poe's "The Man of the Crowd" (1840) is about seeing and

reading. The tale is about much else as well, of course, but

nothing dominates the action more than seeing and reading. As Poe's narrator begins relating the story of his London expe- rience, he describes how he enjoyed his convalescence seated in the bow window of a coffeehouse, alternately reading a news- paper and observing the surroundings both within and with- out. Before long the newspaper yields completely to the street, yet not before the act of observing has become analogous to

reading a written text. In general terms, Poe's story describes one man's effort to read another man, who happens to be a den- izen and therefore a representative of the modern urban envi- ronment. Read in conjunction with scattered comments that Poe made regarding the city in numerous other writings, "The Man of the Crowd" indicates the importance of observing the urban landscape and reading its signs. In this tale Poe implicitly

Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 56, No. 4, pp. 445-465. ISSN: 0891-9356. ? 2002 by The Regents of the University of California/Society. All rights reserved. Send requests for permission to reprint to: Rights and Permissions, University of California

Press,Journals Division, 2000 Center Street, Suite 303, Berkeley, CA 94704-1223.

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NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE

challenges all readers to broaden their definition of reading and to recognize its relationship to seeing.

The common proverbial expression "I read

you like a book," which was also current in Poe's time, has been articulated in a variety of ways: "You will read any man's heart, as plain as a book"; "I read your black heart like an open book"; "I could read his in'ards like a book"; and "I could read his

thoughts as if they were an open book." In The House of the Seven Gables (1851) Nathaniel Hawthorne writes of Holgrave, the da-

guerreotypist: "With the insight on which he prided himself, he fancied that he could look through Phoebe, and all around her, and could read her off like a page of a child's story-book."2 No matter how it has been phrased, the simile embodies a num- ber of cultural assumptions. For one, it assumes widespread lit-

eracy, implying that reading a written text is a relatively simple task that most everyone can do. Further, it assumes that the

process of reading a person's character is analogous to reading a book. Just as reading written language is a matter of recogniz- ing what its words signify, so also reading someone's character is a matter of interpreting a set of personal and cultural signs akin to language-signs such as clothing, facial expression, gesture, demeanor, and voice. This proverbial comparison also establishes a hierarchy of cognitive and perceptual tasks: read-

ing a person's character is a more difficult task than reading a

book; not everyone can read others like books, and not all can be read like books; and those who can be read are those whose external signs render their psychological motives obvious.

With his obsessive emphasis on originality, Poe generally disliked proverbs. Concerning "the whole race of what are

1 See Archer Taylor and BartlettJere Whiting, A Dictionary of American Proverbs and

ProverbialPhrases, I820-I880 (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press,

1958), p. 37; and Bartlett Jere Whiting, Modern Proverbs and Proverbial Sayings (Cam-

bridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1989), p. 65. 2 The House of the Seven Gables, ed. William Charvat and Fredson Bowers, et al., vol. 2

of The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Columbus: Ohio State Univ.

Press, 1965), p. 182.

446

POE'S "THE MAN OF THE CROWD"

termed maxims and popular proverbs," he wrote in 1842, "nine- tenths of [them] are the quintessence of folly."3 Nevertheless, Poe did occasionally use proverbs in his writings, for he was amenable to incorporating traditional sayings provided that he could apply them in original ways. The beginning paragraph of "The Man of the Crowd" echoes the proverbial expression about reading someone like a book, for it assumes a similar re- lationship between reading a book and reading a person's char- acter. Instead of emphasizing the ease with which the two could be read, however, Poe's opening stresses the occasional impos- sibility of reading either a book or someone's personality. The story itself implies that the process of reading a book or seeing into a man's heart is by no means as simple as traditional wisdom would have it. After noting that "it was well said of a certain German book that 'er lasst sich nicht lesen'-it does not permit itself to be read," Poe presents an analogy to the unreadable book: "There are some secrets which do not permit themselves to be told"-or, in stronger terms, there are hideous "mysteries which will not suffer themselves to be revealed."4 Like the prover- bial comparison, "The Man of the Crowd" draws an analogy be- tween the act of reading a book and the act of perceiving char- acter, yet unlike the traditional simile, Poe's story suggests that just as there are books that cannot be read, so too there are in- stances when character cannot be understood.

The opening remarks occur in the voice of Poe's nameless narrator, who makes them prior to recalling his personal expe- riences observing the streets of London and following a myste- rious old man over them for a night and a day. Little time has passed since then, for the experience with the old man took place "not long ago, about the closing in of an evening in au- tumn" (p. 507). Though recent, this experience has profoundly changed him: before encountering the old man, the narrator

3 Poe, rev. of Ballads and Other Poems, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, in Edgar Al- lan Poe: Essays and Reviews, ed. G. R. Thompson (New York: Library of America, 1984), p. 679.

4 Edgar Allan Poe, "The Man of the Crowd," in Collected Works of EdgarAllan Poe, ed. Thomas Ollive Mabbott, 3 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 1969-1978), II, 506-7. Further references are to this edition and are included by page number in the text.

447

NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE

appears to have had complete confidence in his ability to dis- cern character on the basis of external appearance. As he de- scribes his own thought processes and personal behavior inside the "D- Coffee House," he seems capable of reading anyone like a book. The physical appearance of almost everyone he ob- serves offers him easy access to their identities.

The narrator is doubly equipped for reading the street, for not only is he a shrewd observer but he is also well educated, as his numerous literary and historical allusions indicate.5 His

wide-ranging literary knowledge reinforces the similarity be- tween reading written texts and reading the street: he can glibly toss off references to Lucian and Tertullian and recall lines of The Iliad in the original Greek to suit his mood. Supplementing his knowledge of Greek poetry and history and the Latin fathers, the narrator takes an interest in books as material objects, as his later reference to the Hortulus Animae indicates-his knowl-

edge of this once-popular yet by-then-obscure devotional man- ual marks him as an antiquarian. Despite his classical erudition and his antiquarian interests, however, the narrator also accepts the advances of modern science: he has a fondness for new tech-

nology such as rubber overshoes, and in an early version of the

story he mentions the phrenologist George Combe.6 Trained in reading literary texts and cognizant of modern scientific and

technological advances, the narrator appears well prepared for

reading the streets of the modern city. By placing him inside a London coffeehouse, Poe further

emphasizes the narrator's role as both a reader and an infor- mation seeker. The coffeehouse had traditionally been a place where people could both read local and distant papers and catch up on the latest news, and the best coffeehouses in Lon- don subscribed to papers from major cities and ports through- out the world. For example, the Baltic Coffee House on Thread- needle Street, a London coffeehouse that flourished during Poe's lifetime, subscribed to all of the prominent London dai- lies as well as to papers from Amsterdam, Hamburg, Liverpool,

5 See Denis Donoghue, "The Man of the Crowd," in his The Old Moderns: Essays on

Literature and Theory (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994), p. 12. 6 For Poe's deletion of Combe from the story, see Mabbott's note, p. 516, n. 4.

Combe (1788-1848) was a leading phrenologist, who advocated a science that theo-

retically offered a way to read personality on the basis of outward appearance.

448

POE S "THE MAN OF THE CROWD"

New York, and Paris. In addition, the Baltic offered its patrons a shelf of reference works useful for conducting commercial business.7 Two doors down from the Baltic, the North and South American Coffee House also flourished in Poe's day. According to an 1845 account, this coffeehouse was "the complete centre for American intelligence" and kept on file newspapers "from every quarter of the globe."James Davies, the proprietor of the North and South American, the account continues, deserved "great credit ... for the perseverance and industry he displayed in making the necessary arrangements with the American press for the regular transmission of their journals."8 Commercial travelers from overseas frequented London coffeehouses, often staying at adjoining hotels and using the coffeehouse for their local business address. Poe's foster father, John Allan, after bringing his family to Great Britain while he established a Lon- don branch of his firm, likely patronized the London coffee- houses regularly as a way to keep abreast of the latest news regarding shipping and trade and to establish business con- nections. Similarly, customers who frequented London coffee- houses in Poe's day often were engaged in the mercantile trade and made it part of their business to be able to process infor- mation as quickly as possible. Poe's narrator, possibly an Ameri- can merchant stranded in London by his recent illness, is just beginning to recover his capacity to read the urban terrain.

By having his narrator frequently look up from his newspa- per to observe the crowded London street through the coffee- house window, Poe emphasizes the visual nature of reading a modern newspaper, a notion that he reinforced in his critical writings. Comparing British quarterlies with daily newspapers in an 1845 discussion of the contemporary periodical press, Poe suggested that the quarterlies examined "only topics which are caviare to the many... In a word, their ponderosity is quite out of keeping with the movement-with the rush of the age."9

7 See Bryant Lillywhite, London Coffee Houses: A Reference Book of Coffee Houses of the Seventeenth, Eighteenth, and Nineteenth Centuries (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1963), . ioo.

8 [Anon.], "The City" (1845), quoted in Lillywhite, London Coffee Houses, p. 413. 9 Edgar Allan Poe, "Graham's Magazine," in Writings in "The BroadwayJournal". Non-

fictional Prose, ed. Burton R. Pollin, 2 vols., vols. 3 and 4 of Collected Writings ofEdgarAl- lan Poe (New York: Gordian Press, 1986), I, 25.

449

NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE

The quarterlies, he maintained, inadequately suited the increas-

ingly fast pace of modern society, while the daily newspaper had "the imperative necessity of catching, currente calamo, every topic as it flits before the eye of the public" ("Graham's," p. 25). Situating the process of reading a newspaper within the vi- sual culture, Poe implied that a newspaper article differed from other contemporary printed texts because, unlike more

ponderous writings, it was not a static thing upon which read- ers could fix their gaze. Amid the great variety of articles and advertisements, any single item in a newspaper more nearly resembled a moving image passing before the eyes, one that

scarcely caught the reader's attention before subsequent im-

ages crowded it from his or her gaze. Poe's narrator offers some details regarding his precise ac-

tivities inside the D- Coffee House: "With a cigar in my mouth and a newspaper in my lap, I had been amusing myself for the greater part of the afternoon, now in poring over adver- tisements, now in observing the promiscuous company in the room, and now in peering through the smoky panes into the street" (p. 507). Poe's diction and use of alliteration ("poring" and "peering") reinforces the visual nature of reading the

newspaper, while his syntax parallels the narrator's three activi- ties and therefore makes them analogous. For the narrator, reading the paper, scrutinizing the appearance of the coffee- house patrons, and observing the street through the window are all interchangeable actions. By having his narrator specifi- cally compare watching people with reading advertisements, Poe stresses the idea that people's outward appearances adver- tise who they are.10

The comparison that Poe makes between gazing through a window and reading a written text was not unprecedented. The previous year, in "Windows, Considered from Withinside," an anonymous contributor to the Southern Literary Messenger had observed: "A window, to those who have read a little in Na- ture's school, thus becomes a book, or a picture, in which her

genius may be studied, handicraft though the canvass be, and

10 See John F. Kasson, Rudeness and Civility: Manners in Nineteenth-Century Urban America (New York: Hill and Wang, 1990), p. 83.

450

POE'S "THE MAN OF THE CROWD"

little as the glazier may have thought of it.""1 While this writer is more concerned with observing the natural world than the urban world, his words nevertheless are similar to the idea in "The Man of the Crowd": he parallels gazing through a window with reading a book, for both the window and the book medi- ate the information they present. In Poe's tale the newspaper functions as the printed medium through which the narrator reads advertisements, and the coffeehouse window, through its smokiness, mediates his vision and influences how he reads the street.

Given the physical condition of the coffeehouse window, it seems remarkable that Poe's narrator is able to discern the iden- tities of the various types of people outside. Early in the story he attributes his intuitive ability to a keen state of mind result- ing from his convalescence. Recovering from a longstanding illness, he feels as if the film from his mental vision has de- parted or, to paraphrase his quotation from The Iliad, as if a mist has been lifted from his eyes. Since he describes the cof- feehouse window as an assembly of "smoky panes," the narrator has apparently exchanged an internal mist for an external one. In Poe's time a London coffeehouse window must have been speckled with road grime, rain spots, and smudgy fingerprints from the outside, as well as thickly coated with condensation and obscured by cigar smoke from the inside.

Recognizing Poe's analogy between the window and the newspaper, however, one cannot help but wonder what kind of smoke, figuratively speaking, obscures the newspaper. In Poe's day (as in our own), in order to verify the clarity of an idea it was common to make proverbial reference to the written word, as in the saying "It's all there in black and white." The process of reading a printed text, however, may not be as clear as it seems: Poe's analogy between the smoky window and the news- paper suggests that even though a newspaper can be read clearly enough, unknown factors may cloud its meaning. Jean Coc- teau, in an extraordinary assertion, names Poe as the inventor of mass journalism, citing as proof Poe's 1836 essay "Maelzel's

11 [Anon.], "Windows, Considered from Withinside," Southern Literary Messenger, 5 (1839), 528.

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NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE

Chess-Player."'2 In essence, Cocteau means that what we see and read in our daily newspapers is controlled by invisible and unknown forces. The unseen controls the seen.

As the narrator gazes through the window into the street, the passers-by ultimately take his attention away from both his

newspaper and the people inside the coffeehouse. He con-

verges his three activities-reading the advertisements, watch-

ing people inside the coffeehouse, and observing the street- into one. Every face in the crowd becomes another text for him to read: "although the rapidity with which the world of light flitted before the window, prevented me from casting more than a glance upon each visage, still it seemed that, in my peculiar mental state, I could frequently read, even in that brief interval of a glance, the history of long years" (p. 51 i). The narrator's reaction to the startling appearance of the old man reinforces the links between reading a written text, perceiving character, and observing the street, for the narrator makes a figurative comparison to describe what he thinks: "'How wild a history,' I said to myself, 'is written within that bosom!'" (p. 51 1).

In the modern city that was emerging in Poe's time, the activity of reading the street was literally becom-

ing a matter of reading, for the "word on the street" was be-

coming much more apparent in terms of both size and quan- tity. Two articles that appeared in the July 1840 Southern Literary Messenger, four months before "The Man of the Crowd" was first

published in Graham's Magazine, associate signboards with big cities, and one of them emphasizes how large these signboards were becoming. The author of "Rambling Sketches"-who calls himself "a Rustic"-expresses sympathy for city dwellers, specifically those who live along "the dry and dusty streets of the great Metropolis," cannot escape the "rattling of coaches" and "ringing of bells," and "have never been out of sight of a

signboard, or a barber's-pole."'3 Just as the harsh dust irritates

12 See Jean Cocteau, Past Tense, ed. Pierre Chanel, trans. Richard Howard, 2 vols.

(New York: Harcourt BraceJovanovich, 1987), I, 37. 13 [Anon.], "Rambling Sketches.-No. II," Southern Literary Messenger, 6 (1840), 580.

452

POE'S "THE MAN OF THE CROWD"

the skin and the raucous street noise irritates the ears, so too obnoxious urban sights like signboards irritate the eyes. The other Messenger article, "Autobiography of an Irritable Man," describes the title character's arrival in Philadelphia, where his uncle, a merchant whom he has never met, lives. Although the nephew has never visited his uncle, he is able to locate him by reading his name written in large letters on the sign outside his warehouse, the sight of which prompts the nephew to read it as an emblem of his uncle's personality-upon seeing the sign, he begins to hope that his uncle's heart is "as big as his sign- board." 14 Poe's multiple associations between reading and visual perception in "The Man of the Crowd" reinforce the increasing importance of the written word to visual culture. Language was becoming more and more visible, and cities were starting to be covered with writing.

In Sketches by Boz (1836) Charles Dickens captures the area in London known as Scotland Yard immediately before and af- ter its gentrification (which occurred around the same time that the police established themselves there). Formerly, Dickens writes, the place was inhabited mainly by the unlettered, "a race of strong and bulky men, who repaired to the wharfs in Scot- land Yard regularly each morning, about five or six o'clock, to fill heavy waggons with coal."15 The local establishments, cater- ing to the needs of these coalheavers, advertised themselves us- ing the traditional iconography common to London streets for centuries, the representative icons that, as Dickens describes, let the illiterate clientele know what goods and services were available, and where: "The tailor displayed in his window a Lil- liputian pair of leather gaiters, and a diminutive round frock, while each doorpost was appropriately garnished with a model of a coal sack. The two eating-house keepers exhibited joints [of beef] of a magnitude, and puddings of a solidity, which coalheavers could appreciate" (p. 65). In other words, when the coalheavers needed a good, hearty meal, they went to the eating house at the sign of joint and pudding. But with the ar-

14 J. T., "Autobiography of an Irritable Man," Southern Literary Messenger, 6 (1840), 526.

15 Charles Dickens, Sketches by Boz and Other Early Papers, i833-I839, ed. Michael Slater (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1994), p. 65.

453

NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE

rival of "civilization," Dickens notes, "one of the eating house keepers began to court public opinion, and to look for custom- ers among a new class of people. He covered his little dining ta- bles with white cloths, and got a painter's apprentice to inscribe

something about hot joints from twelve to two, in one of the lit- tle panes of his shop window" (p. 68). In order to lure a higher- class patronage, in other words, the tavern keeper let his pic- torial icon of a joint of beef give way to a written description lettered onto the window. This written message would have

puzzled and dismayed the illiterate coalheavers and, therefore, would have discouraged their patronage; at the same time, however, the written text would have encouraged literate con- sumers to patronize the tavern. To the literate the written word could be more instantly recognizable and comprehensible than a visual image.

In Sketches by Boz Dickens suggests that on the London streets the written word was starting to become a part of the modern urban landscape. Yet the shift from image to written text had advanced even further on the streets of major Ameri- can cities than in London. In "Glimpses at Gotham," a series of sketches published in The Ladies Companion in 1839, Joseph Holt Ingraham describes the "numerous shops for the sale of

ready-made clothing, and boots and shoes" in Chatham Square. Most of the shoe shops, Ingraham observes, used "mammoth boots for signs, (on one of which, the gaping passer-by is as- tounded by the words, 'The largest Boot in the World,' written on it large as life)."16 From Ingraham's description, it would seem that the most enterprising and forward-thinking shoe salesman in Chatham Square elevated his shop and its mer- chandise above those of his competitors through the use of the written word.

Foreign travelers to the United States were quick to notice that the written word had become much more prominent in New York City than in contemporary European cities. British traveler J. S. Buckingham, for example (who visited New York in late 1837, a time coinciding with Poe's first sojourn there), observed:

16 [Joseph Holt] Ingraham, "Glimpses at Gotham.-No. IV," Ladies Companion, lo

(1839), 291.

454

POE'S "THE MAN OF THE CROWD"

A custom prevails, in the principal streets for shops, of hav- ing wooden pillars planted along the outer edge of the pave- ment, with horizontal beams reaching from pillar to pillar, not unlike the stanchions and cross pieces of a rope-walk. On these pillars, usually painted white, are pasted large printed placards, announcing the articles sold in the shop before which they stand; and from the under side of the horizontal beam are suspended, by hooks or rings, show-boards with printed bills of every colour. This is especially the case opposite the bookstores.17

Such advertisements verify the impulse of retailers to take ad-

vantage of the literacy of passers-by. The growing number of written signs advertising products and services for sale, besides

indicating the burgeoning consumerism associated with mo-

dernity, also reveals that, among the nation's free population, the United States was approaching near-universal literacy. In the decades to come, as the populations of other major cities

throughout the world also approached near-universal literacy, these cities too contained more and more written signs.

Of course most street advertisements, like other common- place aspects of everyday visual culture in the time before pho- tography, have escaped historical record; yet the contemporary press occasionally recorded some of these ads, preserving them for posterity. In New York City during the 183os, for example, one grogshop posted the following sign, recorded in the New York Constellation and reprinted as column filler in the Philadel- phia Ariel:

TAKE NOTICE You never tasted better

LIQUORS in your life and

ONLY 3 cents per glass 18

Apparently the newspaper's typesetters preserved the physical appearance of the sign's lettering. Written in roman block capi-

17 J. S. Buckingham, America, Historical, Statistic, and Descriptive, 3 vols. (London: Fisher, Son, and Co., [1841]), I, 49-50.

18 ["Signs in New York"], Ariel, 3 (1830), 158.

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NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE

tals, the first two words beckoned passers-by to begin reading the sign before they had come near enough to read the remain- der of it and discern its precise nature. For those in a hurry, the two words in uppercase italics supplied key information: booze available here. Using the cheapness of his liquor as its prime selling point, the proprietor of this grogshop both appealed to a fairly low socioeconomic clientele and, incidentally, offered an indication of the widespread literacy in Poe's New York.

The growing number of written signs also indicated the in-

creasingly fast pace of modern society-or the "rush of the

age," as Poe called it. Such signs gave new currency to an old

proverb: "He who runs may read." For centuries this proverb had been used figuratively to indicate any idea that was so obvi- ous that the most ignorant churl could not help but notice it. Within the modern urban landscape, however, this proverb be- came literalized, in terms of both running and reading: like the motto on Ingraham's mammoth boot, the lettering on many street-facing signs was so large that passers-by, moving rapidly through the city, could still read them.

In his own writings Poe used the proverb "He who runs

may read" both figuratively and literally. In the September 1841 Graham's Magazine, in a review of Frederick Marryatt'sJo- seph Rushbrook; or The Poacher, Poe invoked the proverb to char- acterize the novel's over-obvious plot: "That Joseph should, in the end, be brought to trial for the peddler's murder is so clearly the author's design, that he who runs may read it" (Essays and Reviews, p. 326). In "Never Bet the Devil Your Head: A Tale with a Moral" (1841), however, Poe's narrator uses the proverb to pertain specifically to the written word-and even to the ty- pographical style of the title in Graham s-by characterizing the tale as "a history about whose obvious moral there can be no

question whatever, since he who runs may read it in the large capitals which form the title of the tale."19 By the end of the nineteenth century this proverb would become absolutely com-

monplace to descriptions of the modern urban world. Discuss-

ing late-nineteenth-century lodging houses in the Bowery and

19 Poe, "Never Bet the Devil Your Head: A Tale with a Moral," in Collected Works, II, 622. The story first appeared in Graham's Magazine, 19 ( 1841), 124-27.

456

POE'S "THE MAN OF THE CROWD"

the signs that advertised them, for example, in 1892 journalist Julian Ralph observed: "Within recent years these [lodging houses] have multiplied to such an extent as to bring about a keen competition, and he who runs may read the force of this in single lines that have been added to many of the signs."20 Poe's narrator in "The Man of the Crowd," unable to under- stand the old man from his comfortable seat inside the coffee- house, feels compelled to run after him in order to read his character.

Hart Crane recognized Poe's affinity to the billboard-rich, modern urban landscape. In The Bridge (1930) Crane locates Poe in a particular place where crowds gather in large cities, the subway:

And why do I often meet your visage here, Your eyes like agate lanterns-on and on Below the toothpaste and the dandruff ads?21

Associating Poe's face with billboard advertising, the speaker of the poem not only indicates the influence of Poe's writings but also reveals the importance of his personal image. Poe himself deserves credit for anticipating the possibility that his photo- graphic portrait could achieve iconographic status. Motivated in part by his belief in the importance of physiognomy and in part by his desire for notoriety, Poe had several daguerreotypes of himself taken during the course of his career, and photo- graphic images of him were commonly used to interpret his life and works.22 Crane's simile, which alludes to Poe's poem "To Helen" (1843), plays upon the prevailing critical impulse to use Poe's personal image to interpret his writings. Thus Crane makes explicit what "The Man of the Crowd" implies: in this story the narrator reads the faces in the crowd like advertise- ments. The speaker of The Bridge catches the image of Poe's

20 Julian Ralph, "The Bowery," Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine, 43 (1892), 233. 21 Hart Crane, The Bridge, in The Complete Poems and Selected Letters and Prose of Hart

Crane, ed. Brom Weber (New York: Liveright, 1966), p. 1 io. 22 See William A. Pannapacker, "A Question of 'Character': Visual Images and the

Nineteenth-Century Construction of Edgar Allan Poe," Harvard Library Bulletin, n.s. 7, no. 3 (1996), 22.

457

NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE

face and the billboards in one glance and thus conveys Crane's analogy between the two.

Architectural structures were not the only places where printed placards were used to advertise which goods and ser- vices were available in the city. In Poe's day the body and the

signboard were starting to converge. In "The Man that Was Used

Up" (1839), for example, each of GeneralJohn A.B.C. Smith's

prosthetics is identified with a specific brand name; put to-

gether, they virtually turn him into a walking advertisement.23 Though the term "sandwichman" postdates "The Man of

the Crowd," the figure of a man traipsing through the streets sandwiched between advertising placards was becoming an in-

creasingly prominent sight in Dickens's London as well as Poe's New York. In Sketches by Boz Dickens mentions "an animated sandwich composed of a boy between two boards" (p. 255). Walter Benjamin, in his research notes collected as The Arcades

Project (written 1927-1940), characterizes the sandwichman as "the last incarnation of the flaneur," yet, as Susan Buck-Morss observes, Benjamin assumed that the sandwichman was a by- product of the twentieth century and was apparently unaware of its origins in the nineteenth.24 Still, Benjamin's association of the flaneur and the sandwichman is not without merit: the flaneur, often a man of independent means, took to the city streets for his leisure, as a way to exercise his legs and eyes si-

multaneously.25 Signboards were one of many texts available to

23 See Poe, "The Man that Was Used Up," in Collected Works, II, 376-92; see also Tim Armstrong, Modernism, Technology, and the Body: A Cultural Study (Cambridge: Cam-

bridge Univ. Press, 1998), p. 92. 24 See Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin

(Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 1999), p. 451; see also Buck-

Morss, "The Flaneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore: The Politics of Loitering," New German Critique, no. 39 (1986), 107.

25 The relationship between "The Man of the Crowd" and the flaneur has received considerable attention. The classic essay on the flaneur is Walter Benjamin, "The Fla- neur" (written 1938, first published 1969), in his Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Verso, 1976), pp. 35-66. The best recent essay elaborating the relationship between Poe's story and the flaneur is Dana

Brand, "Reconstructing the 'Flaneur': Poe's Invention of the Detective Story," Genre, 18

(1985), 36-56, which Brand later incorporated as part of The Spectator and the City in Nineteenth- Century American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1991). The fullest and finest treatment of the flaneur is Anke Gleber, The Art of Taking a Walk: Fla- nerie, Literature, and Film in Weimar Culture (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1999).

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the flaneur to read and interpret. Benjamin observes that to the flaneur, "the shiny, enamelled signs of businesses are at least as good a wall ornament as an oil painting is to a bourgeois in his salon" ("The Flaneur," p. 37). Like the flaneur, the sandwich- man, too, walked the city streets, yet he did so out of necessity, as a way to gain a meager income when he could find no other, more respectable way to earn a living. Whereas the flaneur's primary purpose in walking the streets was to see and read the urban terrain, the sandwichman sought to call attention to him- self, to be seen and read.

Poe incorporated the image of the sandwichman into his short story "The Business Man" (1840), which he first pub- lished a few months prior to "The Man of the Crowd." In this tale the title character, Peter Proffit, situates himself "in some fashionable promenade or other place of public amusement" and does "an extensive and profitable business in the Tailor's Walking-Advertisement line."26 Exemplified by Peter Proffit, the figure of the sandwichman verifies the ease with which a man on the street could be read: dressed in signboards, he could lit- erally be read like a book.

Employed as an animated billboard, the sandwichman re- duced himself to scarcely more than a handful of words in the service of commercial enterprise. In his fine discussion of "The Business Man,"J. A. Leo Lemay calls Poe's walking advertiser "a splendid symbol for the dehumanization of modern man."27 During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, writ- ers continued to use the sandwichman to reassert such dehu- manization. Dion Boucicault's sensational melodrama After Dark (1868), which Nicholas Daly compares to "The Man of the Crowd," opens at a railway station complete with a bustling crowd containing various urban types, including a sandwich- man.28 In Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in KingArthur's Court (1889) the narrator turns the knights-errant into perambulat- ing billboards, as he explains: "I had started a number of these

26 Poe, "The Business Man," in Collected Works, II, 484. 27 "Poe's 'The Business Man': Its Contexts and Satire of Franklin's Autobiography," Poe

Studies, 15 (1982), 32. 28 See Daly, "Blood on the Tracks: Sensation Drama, the Railway, and the Dark Face

of Modernity," Victorian Studies, 42 (1999), 61 and 72, n. 17.

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people out-the bravest knights I could get- each sandwiched between bulletin-boards bearing one device or another."29 (When Connecticut Yankee was adapted for the cinema in 1922, theater owners dressed their sandwichmen in armor and sent them out on horses to promote the film.)30 Early in King Vi- dor's 1928 film The Crowd, John (James Murray) entertains his sweetheart Mary (Eleanor Boardman) from the upper level of a double-decker bus by poking fun at a sandwichman, even

though dire straits would eventually reduce him to the same line of work. Poe's narrator in "The Man of the Crowd," read-

ing the faces in the crowd in much the same way as he reads

newspaper advertisements, suggests that virtually all city dwell- ers are walking advertisers, sandwichmen and sandwichwomen who sell whatever they have to sell to their fellow members of the urban public.

Closing "The Man of the Crowd" as he be-

gan it, Poe's narrator reiterates the comparison between read-

ing a man's heart and reading a book. He realizes that he will learn no more about the old man whom he has been following through the streets of London, and concludes: "The worst heart of the world is a grosser book than the 'Hortulus Animae,' and

perhaps it is but one of the great mercies of God that 'er lasst sich nicht lesen"' (p. 515). Using the same German phrase in both the first sentence of the tale and at its end, the narrator

neatly encloses a story that otherwise lacks closure. The pur- pose of his arduous pursuit, after all, was to discern the old man's identity; failing to accomplish that purpose, the narrator

alternatively seeks rhetorical closure. In revising "The Man of the Crowd" for inclusion in the

1845 Wiley and Putnam edition of his Tales, Poe added a foot-

29 Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, ed. Bernard L. Stein, vol. 9 of The Works of Mark Twain (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press,

1979), p. 185. 30 See "Exploitation Men Carry Mark Twain Classic to Youth," Exhibitors Herald,

18 February 1922, p. 49.

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POE'S "THE MAN OF THE CROWD"

note to reinforce the parallel between the story's ending and its beginning. Glossing "Hortulus Animae," he identifies the title as "The 'Hortulus Animae cum Oratiunculis Aliquibus Superadditis' of Grfinninger" (p. 515n). The opening sentence had men- tioned "a certain German book," and Poe's added footnote em- phasizes the fact that although he is referring to a work written in Latin, the book itself originated from a German printer. By "Grfinninger" Poe meant Johann Gruninger, who had printed multiple illustrated editions of the Hortulus Animae at Strassburg in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.

Critics who have discussed the story have generally assumed that the "certain German book" that the narrator alludes to at the beginning is the Hortulus Animae. In their edition of Poe's short stories, for example, Stuart Levine and Susan Levine spe- cifically identify the Hortulus Animae as "the book that 'does not permit itself to be read,"' and they even print illustrations from an early edition.31 Yet in Poe's second use of the German phrase, the pronoun er (or, properly, es),32 refers not to the book but to the heart, "the worst heart of the world" (p. 515)-or the heart of darkness, as Joseph Conrad would later term it. Although the footnote that Poe added in 1845 reinforces the fact that he considered the Hortulus Animae to be a German book, in his reference at the tale's beginning he might have had any of a number of different German books in mind. Indeed, he might not even have been referring specifically to a book of German origin, for in the literary parlance of the time, "German" often simply meant "Gothic." In 1840, for example, countering charges that his works displayed excessive Germanism, Poe wrote: "I maintain that terror is not of Germany, but of the soul."33 The narrator's reference to "a certain German book" jibes with other Gothic elements in the story's opening para-

31 See the editorial notes to The Short Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe: An Annotated Edition, ed. Stuart Levine and Susan Levine (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1976), p. 284. The Levines print four illustrations from a 1518 edition of the Hortulus Animae printed for Johann Koberger in Nuremberg.

32 See Thomas S. Hansen with Burton R. Pollin, The German Face of Edgar Allan Poe: A Study of Literary References in His Works (Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1995), p. 52.

33 Poe, "Preface to Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque" (1840), in Edgar Allan Poe: Po- etry and Tales, ed. Patrick F. Quinn (New York: Library of America, 1984), p. 129.

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graph-ghostly confessors, hideous mysteries, horror, and the

grave.34 Further mitigating the association between the Hortulus

Animae and the unreadable book, Poe later used basically the same German phrase in reference to a different book. In "Fifty Suggestions," first published in Graham's Magazine in 1849, he

applied the phrase to a work by Cornelius Mathews, and in- stead of blaming its author, he blamed the book itself: "The book alone is in fault, after all. The fact is, that 'es ldsst sich nicht lesen'-it will not permit itself to be read."35 Accusing someone of having written an unreadable book was not an unknown im-

pulse in the critical discourse of Poe's time. Two years before "The Man of the Crowd" appeared, a reviewer of Edmund Rob- erts's Embassy to the Eastern Courts of Cochin China, Siam, and Muscat (1837) criticized the author's use of lengthy quotations from other sources, supposedly for the reader's benefit: "It is this benevolent disposition which on the part of our travellers

produces unreadable books."36 But through "The Man of the Crowd," Poe's description has entered modern critical dis- course: for example, Martin Kevorkian applies Poe's phrase to Samuel Beckett's 1953 novel Watt (where Beckett himself de- scribes a character moving "slowly alone, like something out of

Poe"), and Geoff Waite applies it to the works of Friedrich Nietzsche.37 Still, the unreadable book that Poe's narrator al- ludes to may or may not be the Hortulus Animae. In order to de- termine how well the description fits, we need to understand Poe's knowledge of this work.

Scholars cannot be certain how Poe knew about the Hortu- lus Animae, but they generally agree that he most likely took the

34 The best discussion of Gothic elements in "The Man of the Crowd" is PamelaJ.

Shelden, "Poe's Urban Nightmare: 'The Man of the Crowd' and the Gothic Tradition," Studies in the Humanities, 4, no. 2 (1975), 31-35-

35 Edgar Allan Poe, "Fifty Suggestions," in The Brevities: Pinakidia, Marginalia, Fifty

Suggestions, and Other Works, ed. Burton R. Pollin, vol. 2 of Collected Writings (New York:

Gordian Press, 1985), p. 505. 36 [Anon.], "American Embassy to Asiatic Courts" (rev. of Embassy to the Eastern

Courts of Cochin China, Siam, and Muscat, by Edmund Roberts), Princeton Review, 10

(1838), 194. 37 See Kevorkian, "Misreading Watt: The Scottish Psychoanalysis of Samuel Beck-

ett," ELH, 61 (1994), 427; and Waite, "Nietzsche's Baudelaire, or the Sublime Prolep- tic Spin of His Politico-Economic Thought," Representations, no. 50 (1995), 15.

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POE'S "THE MAN OF THE CROWD"

reference from Isaac Disraeli, who in his Curiosities of Literature (first printed 1791) cites a Grininger edition of the Hortulus Animae as an example of tasteless and obscene religious illus- tration.38 Yet Stuart and Susan Levine could not locate an edi- tion of the Hortulus Animae printed by Griininger- or, for that matter, by any other late-fifteenth- or early-sixteenth-century German printers-with illustrations that could be taken as ei- ther obscene or offensive.39 Although the Levines do not refer to Maria Consuelo Oldenbourg's fine bibliography of the Ger- man editions of the Hortulus Animae, which reproduces several dozen woodcuts from numerous editions, none of the editions that Oldenbourg located contain illustrations that can be taken as particularly offensive, either.40 In any case, it seems unlikely that Poe actually saw the edition that Disraeli refers to; rather, he took Disraeli's description on faith.

Following Disraeli, Poe understood that the Hortulus Ani- mae was a Latin text printed in Germany and adorned with tasteless or obscene imagery. Scanty though it was, Poe's under- standing gave him sufficient information to recognize the work as a paradox: a Latin picture-book. In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, when most of the editions of the Hor- tulus Animae appeared, a reading knowledge of Latin was a fairly elite skill; yet anyone can view the images in an illustrated book and form their own opinions of them: no literacy is re- quired. For the general public in late-fifteenth-century Ger- many, then, the Hortulus Animae in its Latin text was an unread- able book, and it would not become readable for them until it was translated into the vernacular. Thus the Hortulus Aninae, as Poe understood it, represented a crucial time of transition in terms of Western intellectual and cultural history. In contrast to Catholic practice, for Protestants reading became essential to the practice of piety. With the Reformation, German devotional manuals were published in the vernacular, and many more

38 See Isaac Disraeli, Curiosities of Literature, 6th ed., 3 vols. (London: John Murray, 1817), II, 119-21. See also Levine and Levine, Short Fiction, pp. 284, and 293, n. 16; and Mabbott, note to "The Man of the Crowd," p. 518, n. 19. 39 See Short Fiction, p. 284, where the Levines note that all of the editions they ex- amined contain "characteristic religious engravings of the age."

40 See Oldenbourg, Hortulus Animae, (I494)-I523: Bibliographie und Illustration (Hamburg: Ernst Hauswedell, 1973).

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people were able to read them. As Johann Griininger pub- lished illustrated Latin editions of the Hortulus Animae, he cre- ated books that marked a transition between the image and the written word-books whose images were readable yet whose texts were not.

The early-sixteenth-century editions of the Hortulus Ani- mae represented a time in the history of Western culture when the written word began to take precedence over the visual im-

age. Poe's reference to the work recalls this earlier time of tran- sition, and thus serves as an analog for "The Man of the Crowd." As the United States achieved widespread literacy in Poe's day, the written word became as understandable as the visual image. Just as the Hortulus Animae marked the transition from image to text, so too "The Man of the Crowd" marks a new period of transition, a time when the word was entering the everyday visual culture and, in so doing, was gaining the qualities of an

image. The idea that "The Man of the Crowd" repeats a pattern in

a literate world that had occurred earlier in a largely illiterate one becomes clearer in comparison. For example, Poe's early tale "King Pest" (1835), set in fourteenth-century England, be-

gins by telling how Legs and Hugh Tarpaulin, the story's two un- lettered sailors, are attracted to an alehouse bearing "for sign the portraiture of a 'Jolly Tar.'"41 Being sailors, the two men are accustomed to visiting strange lands, and they have confidence in their ability to negotiate the streets of foreign cities by in-

terpreting the typical iconic signs. Once inside the alehouse, however, they are faced with a written sign stating "No Chalk"

(which, to those who could read, meant no credit allowed). Unable to read the written message, the two sailors cannot, so to speak, tell chalk from cheese. Instead they see the writing as some kind of sorcery, a cabalistic text warning of great danger. Finding what they cannot read to be threatening, Legs and

Hugh Tarpaulin flee from the alehouse as quickly as they can. Their reaction, therefore, anticipates the narrator's reaction in "The Man of the Crowd."

41 Poe, "King Pest: A Tale Containing an Allegory," in Collected Works, II, 240.

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With the narrator of "The Man of the Crowd" Poe re-

peated the experience of Legs and Hugh Tarpaulin, yet he

changed it to reflect his own time, a period during which the United States was approaching near-universal literacy. Being well read and cognizant of physiognomy, phrenology, and mod- ern technology, the narrator can read people on the basis of external signs, and, like the flaneur, he has great confidence in his ability to read the urban terrain. Yet, like Legs and Hugh Tarpaulin before him, the narrator encounters something that he cannot read, and he, too, finds the unreadable threatening. He reacts by concluding that the old man is "the type and the genius of deep crime" (p. 515). This interpretation of the old man differs little from the way that Legs and Hugh Tarpaulin interpret the written tavern sign: in both cases, the unknown seems to portend danger. In both "King Pest" and "The Man of the Crowd," Poe suggests that few experiences are more terrify- ing than encountering the unreadable in a world we thought we could read, the unknown in a world we thought we knew.

University of Central Oklahoma

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